It is funny, as in odd, peculiar, that Anthony Watts doesn't know that more than 90% of the extra energy we've been adding is stored in the ocean. I mean, Anthony makes himself out to be an expert on climate change, more expert than the experts who research the subject. He's been blogging about climate for about ten years now. To think that he doesn't know one of the most basic facts about global warming is very strange indeed.

The fact that Anthony didn't know that water has a high specific heat capacity is not the only thing that's strange. For someone who pretends to be a science blogger it's quite peculiar that he doesn't understand percentages. He wrote:

First, let me point out (as Frank does) that the graph is unitless on the Y axis, it’s only listed as a percentage, with no reference to a baseline for comparison, though it could be assumed that they mean since 1970.

Almost right. The 93% refers to the percentage of energy accumulated in the oceans from 1971 to 2010, with the remaining 7% having been added to the land, ice and atmosphere.

Anthony Watts has never opened the IPCC AR5 report

Even more peculiar/funny is that Anthony Watts, climate science denier guru, thinks the IPCC AR5 WG1 report has no chapters! I don't find it at all odd that he hasn't read any of the IPCC Assessment Reports. He is a proud fake sceptic after all. What I do find weird is that he is so unfamiliar with them that he doesn't know they are rather large reports, each having multiple volumes and multiple chapters all about climate science. Anthony wrote about the Climate Central graphic:

Oops - Anthony, you've linked to the summary volume, not the main report. The main report not only has a Chapter 3, on oceans, it has chapters 1 through 14. Anthony continued to profess his abysmal ignorance writing:

Unfortunately, that reference cited by Climate Central” appears to be in error as there is no chapter 3 “”Climate Change 2013 The Physical Science Basis” as listed in the table of contents:

...and he proceeded to list the contents of the summary report. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have immediately realised he had the wrong document. Not young Anthony!

Anthony Watts warms a pot of water

It gets worse as Anthony shows off his ignorance about water and heat. He wrote, referring to the IPCC chart above:

Looking at that graph, the idea that increasing CO2 heated the oceans 10x more than the land or atmosphere is just preposterous. Try warming a pot of water by making the room temperature a degree warmer.

Anthony's example of heating a pot of water by heating the air is ridiculous. Not only will it not work, he's got his science all back to front. If the energy that went into heating water was instead released to the same volume of air, the air would probably not be able to absorb it and a lot more of the heat would go into the pot. Anthony might try putting an empty pot on the stove (containing nothing but air), leaving the lid on, and see how long it takes to melt the pot. For best effect I suggest a thin aluminium pot. Then he could try the same experiment with a similar sized pot of the same material but full of water, and see how long it takes. Then he could go out and buy a new stove and a new pot :)

The total heat capacity of the oceans is about 1,000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere. Brian Angliss has the calculations at Scholars and Rogues, if you're in doubt. One kind person pointed this out, but no-one took any notice least of all Anthony Watts. Toneb wrote:

Uncertainty and denial

Then, in complete disregard of the uncertainty ranges shown in the IPCC chart, Anthony added:

What’s even more preposterous is the claimed precision in being able to define this heat content gain, which has it’s basis in sea surface and at depth temperature measurements. ...

...So, in reality, that OHC increase depicted by Climate Central is actually a tiny temperature increase of a few hundredths of a degree C, and one that is likely below the resolution and the precision of the thermometers measuring water temperature to resolve.

Is likely? Well, Anthony Watts is a fake sceptic so one cannot expect him to check or be precise. The text in Box 3.1 (in Chapter 3) of the IPCC AR5 report sets out in some detail the basis for the estimates of change in global energy. Anthony doesn't even realise there is such a chapter in the report. In any case he would feel utterly shamed and humiliated if his fans caught him reading an IPCC report, let alone any of the papers referenced.

After ten years blogging about climate

All of that brings me back to the first point. How is it that after ten years of blogging about climate, Anthony Watts didn't know one of the most obvious, basic facts - that more than 90% of the energy we've added to our planet has gone into the oceans?

There are a few people who seem to think they are the only ones who know that the sun warms Earth. For example, dgp wrote:

December 1, 2017 at 12:43 pm
In my mind, heat bypassing the atmosphere and being deposited in the ocean suggests that solar output and not CO2 is the cause of warming.
By tying to find excuses for their failure, they are providing evidence against themselves.

Where dgp falls short is that she or he hasn't yet got to the point of thinking about why the oceans are accumulating energy. What is stopping the energy that's captured from the sun from being radiated back to space? Why is energy building up instead of staying the same as it used to be? (Answer: rising greenhouse gases.)

There's also quite a bit of "the data must be wrong". David A is one who, despite all the multiple different lines of evidence, still cannot "believe" we are heating the planet, so he opts for the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.

December 1, 2017 at 11:26 pm
Even if they remain fairly evenly distributed, this would not mean their changes in location of readings and or location of disparate ocean currents which do move has not biased the readings. Certainly, beyond their sparsity in attempting to measure the very deep oceans, these movements would increase the error bars.

JohninRedding isn't concerned. He believes in an "intelligent designer" who'll sort it all out (just like his designer did for the dinosaurs, black death, the flu pandemic, the Maya civilisation, the US dust bowl, the Great Depression and the past five major extinctions).

December 1, 2017 at 4:06 pm
Is the ocean some new phenomena? Seems to me it has always been a factor. Could it be that the earth has its ways of counteracting such things as increase in heat? When you believe in intelligent design you recognize the designer may have put in place means to handle problems we humans get in a twist about.

Oh, yes, Harry. Sorry about that. The comment box was too small so I changed the way comments are made. I intended to make the box larger, but haven't yet figured out how to do that. When I find a solution I'll change it back to the way it was, but that might take a while.

You can bet no matter what else happens, Willard Tony will find some way to excuse his complete ignorance of what has just happened here. It's the way he rolls: no responsibility for my actions. Just 'blogging'.

Ever since "I don't understand baselines." has it been so. Actually... even before that. Since WTFUWT existed, in fact. *sigh*

Seriously, if the oceans truly are swallowing most of the heat, the bitterly cold ocean depths have the thermal capacity to continue to absorb excess heat for thousands of years. A problem deferred for thousands of years is frankly someone elses problem. Goodbye global warming crisis.

Accepting the figures in your AR5 diagram (despite my reservation that much of that is an "estimate"), that 300 zetajoules (300 x 10^21 joules) that have allegedly been added to the ocean system since 1971, that still only translates to a 0.05 degree rise in temperature for the entire ocean since 1971 - 2010, 0.0125C / decade.

At this rate the oceans as a whole could absorb several centuries worth of heat before we could even measure it.

2 deg C now ranks as "bitterly cold ocean depths"? The speed of the ocean's "capacity to continue to absorb excess heat energy" is constrained by the efficiency of the density driven movement of cold water sinking at the polar regions. Now there's your problem, EW.

Eric, if you think the accumulated energy cannot be estimated using measurements, then your sums are for nought.

Thing is, most of us live on the land surface, not in the ocean. Even though the oceans are absorbing most of the energy we are adding, the surface is also warming up at an astonishing rate. The problem has not been deferred as you would know.

Sou, the missing heat in the oceans theory in my opinion is an effort to avoid falsification of alarmist climate models, so I'm very dubious about the validity of such estimates.

But its also fun to demonstrate that ocean heat theory is a tremendous thermal drag on global warming, even if we accept alarmist estimates of thermal input.

As for the future, if the oceans are dragging global warming, they will also act to cap future warming. As the Earth's surface warms, the efficiency with which heat is delivered into the oceans will also increase, creating a substantial multi-century, likely multi-millennial negative feedback on anthropogenic global warming.

According to your heroes the ocean is already absorbing 90% of the excess heat generated by anthropogenic emissions. It wouldn't take much of an increase in the thermal efficiency of heat transfer into the ocean to cap surface warming completely.

I'm curious, Eric, can you point to the science on which you are basing this statement, and what do you think it means?

"As the Earth's surface warms, the efficiency with which heat is delivered into the oceans will also increase..."

What will cause a change in efficiency? If the ocean becomes more "efficient" at absorbing energy, is there any reason why the atmosphere would not also become more efficient? If not, what is the difference? What about the land surface. Will it also become more "efficient" at absorbing energy? Wouldn't that mean the world would heat up even faster in your future?

But first, what would cause your purported change in efficiency? Why would warmer water absorb energy more "efficiently" than colder water and what do you mean by "efficiency" in that context?

The influence of the world oceans on climatic response is considered here with emphasis on the heat transferred to waters beneath the well-mixed surface layer and to polar bottom water forming zones. ...

To study the carbon dioxide climate problem, a more realistic time-dependent forcing function is used based on the historical growth of fossil fuel CO2 and a logarithmic scaling law for the temperature increment which would obtain at any instant if the system were in radiative-convective equilibrium. Our results suggest the influence of deep sea thermal storage could delay the full value of temperature increment predicted by equilibrium models by 10 to 20 years in 1980 to 2000 A.D. time frame. Also considered is the model response to periodic forcing, the sensitivity of the results, and the implications of the model results with regard to climatic changes on a decadal to millenial timescale.

"At this rate the oceans as a whole could absorb several centuries worth of heat before we could even measure it."

Not only is the timescale incorrect but this statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how global thermohaline circulation works. In fact we’ve gone out and measured the age at which seawater last touched the atmosphere. A commonly cited number is that the ocean overturns about once every 2000 years. Broecker, 1985 looked at radiocarbon ages at 3 kilometers of depth at locations all around the world and found the youngest in the North Atlantic (North Atlantic Deepwater formation at 105 years) and the oldest in the North Pacific at 1900 years essentially confirming the existence of global thermohaline circulation.

https://s8.postimg.org/noj7in50l/broecker_age.jpg

In any case, that’s just how the oceans work. They are much larger and deeper than something which would overturn in “several centuries”.

"Accepting the figures in your AR5 diagram (despite my reservation that much of that is an "estimate"), that 300 zetajoules (300 x 10^21 joules) that have allegedly been added to the ocean system since 1971”

Here’s where if you had read the section where the figure Sou referenced would have helped. Here’s what it says,

"For the oceans, an estimate of global upper (0 to 700 m depth) ocean heat content change using ocean statistics to extrapo- late to sparsely sampled regions and estimate uncertainties (Domingues et al., 2008) is used (see Section 3.2), with a linear trend from 1971 to 2010 of 137 TW. For the ocean from 700 to 2000 m, annual 5-year running mean estimates are used from 1970 to 2009 and annual estimates for 2010–2011 (Levitus et al., 2012). For the ocean from 2000 m to bottom, a uniform rate of energy gain of 35 [6 to 61] TW from warming rates centred on 1992–2005 (Purkey and Johnson, 2010) is applied from 1992 to 2011, with no warming below 2000 m assumed prior to 1992.”

In other words, they chose the best research on OHC while trying to estimate global OHC. The paper goes on to say…

"It is virtually certain that the Earth has gained substantial energy from 1971 to 2010 — the estimated increase in energy inventory between 1971 and 2010 is 274 [196 to 351] ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 J)"

Note the difference in units (watts versus joules)

"Accepting the figures in your AR5 diagram (despite my reservation that much of that is an "estimate"), that 300 zetajoules (300 x 10^21 joules) that have allegedly been added to the ocean system since 1971, that still only translates to a 0.05 degree rise in temperature for the entire ocean since 1971 - 2010, 0.0125C / decade.”

Watts have a time component (joules per second) and none of the units you cite have a time component except for the rate you cite at the end. Also your heat estimate is off by 25 ZJ.

"As for the future, if the oceans are dragging global warming, they will also act to cap future warming.”

No, you don’t understand how the oceans work. They already work to moderate our climate on a 2000 year timescale, the sea level rise we already see (not to mention Ocean Acidification, changes in organism distributions, coral bleaching, etc.) are just from the parts of the ocean that have interacted with the atmosphere since we’ve been increasing greenhouse gases. Planets without oceans (like what you’re describing) are hostile to life, you need the massive heat budget the ocean provides to keep temperatures within a certain range across a large geographic area. Literally that’s what the oceans do for us.

Chase, the slow overturning of oceans is a good reason to be skeptical of claims that the deep ocean is swallowing the missing heat. But it amuses me sometimes to argue the absurdity of alarmist claims on the basis of their own assumptions..

Eric is "amused" in the manner of an insecure pimply teenager smothering a snigger behind a sweaty paw at the achievements of a knowledgeable, successful adult. If it evokes any response, it may be a raised eyebrow, pity or perhaps contempt.

The rest of the world thinks it's absurd that know-nothing science deniers regard multiple findings of numerous world-renowned experts "absurd". What makes it especially absurd is that the Eric's of the world don't understand the first thing about the science that they say amuses them.

Don't hold your breath, Millicent. I asked the same question and Eric didn't (couldn't) answer. My highly informed guesstimate is that Eric doesn't know what it means let alone could explain the basis for his claim. He's not fishing, he's trolling using very unsophisticated techniques (avoiding answering my question by asking me to answer it, which is not possible).

Instead, I'll call on a scientific source so that he can understand why I disputed his claim:

The expectation is that ocean heat uptake efficiency will reduce with global warming, not increase. However there may be other periods when it will increase again for a short while, like it did a few years ago.

"...the decrease of κ [ocean heat uptake efficiency] represents a physically based response of the climate system to GHG increase, as inferred from the results in GCMs. Therefore, unless models miss effects of other forcing agents, it is likely that this process will occur and act to accelerate surface warming in coming decades."

From this paper, which explores the complexities in the context of the slower global warming that happened for a few years some time ago now:

Sou, It seems that Anthony Watts is just plain ignorant of the science. Here's the science right here...https://4hiroshimas.com/See, there it says plainly...4 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat accumulates in the ocean every second. It says..."This warming is due to more heat trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere"The only thing that bothers me is whether , the next time I go for a dip in the sea, I'll be irradiated or cooked.

I love Eric's pretence to be so ignorant that his crime would be heresy rather than something based on the consequential harm associated with an organised campaign to hinder action to prevent climate catastrophe.

"Chase, the slow overturning of oceans is a good reason to be skeptical of claims that the deep ocean is swallowing the missing heat."

What claims?

I'm serious. Who claims that the abyssal oceans -- the part of the ocean with a temp of ~4C -- are swallowing the heat?

The vast majority of the heat is going into the top 700 meters, not the remaining ~3 kilometers below it. That's what the measurements show.

I think you're attacking a strawman. Yes, if scientists were claiming that the heat were going into the deep oceans, you'd have a point. They're not.

And note that your point about slow overturning doesn't apply to the upper oceans.

Trenberth's "missing heat" was about a lack of non-surface measurements, mostly the first few hundred meters, before we got the ARGO buoy data. Now that we have that data, that heat transfer is no longer missing. We're *observing* it going into the oceans.

New Look

G'day. HotWhopper is having a facelift. Do let me know if you find anything missing or broken.

When you read older articles on a desktop or notebook, you may find the sidebar moves down the page, instead of being on the side. That can happen with some older articles if your browser is not the full width of your computer screen. I am not planning to check every previous post, so if you come across something particularly annoying, send me an email and I'll fix it. Or you can add your thoughts to this feedback article.

You can use the menu up top to get to the blogroll or whatever it is you might be looking for on the sidebar.

When moderation shows as ON, there may be a short or occasionally longer delay before comments appear. When moderation is OFF, comments will appear as soon as they are posted.

All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
‘a climate change denier’

Alternative definition: A former French coin, equal to one twelfth of a Sou, which was withdrawn in the 19th century. Oxford. (The denier has since resurfaced with reduced value.)